Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer

Company: Confidential — cloud platform for modern tech companies
Location: New York, NY
Compensation: $200,000 - $270,000 + competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: H-1B, O-1, OPT

About the Company

The client is the cloud platform for modern tech companies: it lets engineering teams instantly create production-grade infrastructure on AWS, Azure or GCP, deploy application code, and monitor and manage it without the usual complexity, cost and lock-in.

The client (Y Combinator S20) raised a $20M Series A led by FirstMark Capital, is profitable, has grown ARR 8x since 2022, and is headquartered in New York with an office in San Francisco.

The Role

The client is hiring a Founding Engineer to build at every level of the cloud infrastructure stack. This seat is for an engineer who has been a founding engineer at a startup or two, has solved problems end to end in production, and is genuinely excited about infrastructure. You will work in 2-week project cycles with full autonomy, talk to customers directly, and take on the hard infrastructure problems that define the product.

What You Will Do

• Write production-grade software that powers the the client platform across cloud infrastructure.
• Own the full development lifecycle from architecture to production deployment.
• Debug at the deepest levels: shell into VMs, dig through logs and find root causes.
• Read open-source code to debug third-party dependencies.
• Propose and drive your own work in 2-week cycles.
• Support customers directly and bring product intuition to infrastructure decisions.

What You Bring

• 5-8 years building in startups, ideally as a founding engineer or earliest technical hire
• A track record of shipping products end to end, with production systems you can point to
• Genuine excitement about cloud infrastructure
• High agency without a defined playbook
• The ability to debug complex systems under pressure

Nice to Have

• Hands-on infrastructure experience (networking, Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud platforms)
• Products that scaled to meaningful traction
• Zero-to-one product experience

Benefits

30 days PTO, 30 remote days per year, and relocation covered.

Before you apply: get a free recruiter-readiness score for your resume at CareerStanding — about a minute, no signup, and your resume stays in your browser.

REVENUE: 18% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $36K-$49K; 1 seat(s).

TARGET COMPANIES (suggested): Render, Vercel, Fly.io, HashiCorp, Heroku (Salesforce), DigitalOcean, Railway.

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 5-8 in startups yrs; founding/early engineer; infra excitement; end-to-end prod ownership; visa: H-1B, O-1, OPT; location: NYC.